London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

Twitter has launched a feature allowing people to record TV shows and even change channels straight from a Tweet.

The new 'See It' service will allow users in the US to switch their TVs to programmes such as The Voice by clicking on tweets that references the show.

Twitter has partnered with US media powerhouses Comcast and NBCUniversal to launch the service, available to customers of its Xfinity TV set-top box.

Twitter's vice president for business development Jana Messerschmidt said: "Millions of people are exposed to Tweets about a program, so much so that they’re often motivated by the Twitter buzz to tune in.

"By partnering with Comcast, we’ll be able to make it easier than ever to turn on the show everyone is talking about and jump into the conversation."

The feature will debut with NBCUniversal programmes in November, but the microblogging service said the feature is designed to work with other video distribution partners, television networks and websites.

Twitter, which recently filed for a $1 billion IPO in the US, is hoping to position itself as a leader in the so-called 'second screen' field, allowing advertisers to target people who are Tweeting about programmes as they watch it.

The firm this week launched the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, a system to track how much people are talking about specific TV shows on Twitter, and earlier this year bought TV analytics company Bluefin Labs.

Jeremy Green, of technology and telecom analyst Ovum, said of See It: "The point of this is that it’s a first step into turning Twitter into a remote control for the “internet of things” – the future in which all your stuff, from your fridge to your pacemaker, will be able to interact with the internet."

NBCUniversal said it has also signed an advertising partnership with Twitter’s Amplify programme, which promotes TV shows through embedding sponsored, real-time video clips in tweets.

No details were given of any plans to launch the service in the UK or elsewhere.